Tesco

Innovation and ideas for today's food shoppers - digital tools that turn your online food shopping into a service for better living.

Project: Digital Innovation

Role: Design & Concept lead

Agency: Digitas LBi

Plan, Shop, Cook

Over the past few years online food shopping has rapidly increased due to the convenience of regular bulk buys and all the handy tools at our disposal.

Online grocery shopping as a category has a problem with the perception of fresh produce, and for many, the convenience of online shopping has removed choice, ‘inspiration’ and variety.

This presents an opportunity to develop a number of ideas, tools and service innovation focused around the customer cycle of planning, shopping and cooking, across all the different devices we use.

Planning

How can Tesco inspire customers to get excited
and love the food they eat?

We want to make planning meals easier for customers, so they can look forward to the food they’ve chosen and not see food shopping as a chore.

The Recipe Toolbar browser plugin lets you add the ingredients to your shopping basket, and get an instant ‘cost to cook’ price.

Shopping

Chat with your local butcher and meet the real faces of Tesco, with conversational UI's. Smarter filtering, so you only see products based on your own values. Realtime updates of your order, something we've seen become a norm with the likes of Deliveroo, allow you to keep track of your order - just in case you're late home from work. Smarter substitutions allow your pickers to know what items you need for which recipes and swap them out for you.

Better Basket Inspiration.

Buying the same usuals every week makes a shop easy but eating the same thing can be dull. We look at what customers are buying and what they like to eat and suggest a couple of additions to make a new recipe. It’s looking at tried and tested favourites in a new way.

Cooking

How can Tesco inspire trust in the freshness and quality of its food so customers get the most out of their cooking?

Good cooking starts with quality ingredients. There’s a mistrust of food quality when buying online, because you can’t feel, smell or choose the items yourself. Customers need to trust the overall quality of the food during and after their shop. We can help them cook their food at its very best and avoid food waste.

Design Considerations

As well as innovation tools, we provided some additional design considerations like simplified and refined navigation to reflect the customers needs

The current navigation had evolved organically and represented a traditional business centric view. Moving to a new customer centric model, delivering on the values Simple, Honest, Human to re-enforces a customers natural food journey through the stages Plan, Shop, Cook.

Reducing confusion and increasing inspiration through refined photography

The current photography is confusing at a glance, with many options represented by similar or poorly shot photos, obscured by labels or offers, cold and unloved. We proposed making the food the hero with larger, more inspiring images and natural insitu shots of food being prepared to provide an extra level of authenticity and trust.